Memory as Curriculum: Black Men Teaching Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at a Historically White College

• In Event: Faculty of Color Counternarratives, Lessons, and Disruptions: Examining Truth, Praxis, and Erasure in Teacher Education

Abstract

This presentation examines how a Black male faculty member who instructs courses in curriculum theory to pre-service educators contests what constitutes truth in curriculum theory for predominantly white students. From creating Black history month to counteract a history curriculum that taught African Americans a subhuman role in the world (Woodson, 1933), memory as curriculum is an intergenerational site of educational and social conflict. We see this battle play out today with the current spate of anti-critical race theory laws, and attempts to ban books such as The Bluest Eye from school libraries. While remembering the past matters, it is more important to remember the past accurately; and this is the site of the current battles of what Snyder (2021) and Koposov (2017) call “memory laws” that have complicated how issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion are taught on college campuses across the country.

This presentation utilizes philosophical curriculum inquiry (Schubert, 1991, pp. 61-78) utilizes Pinar’s currere method (1975/1994) to discuss how a Black male faculty member in a teacher education department navigated teaching diversity, equity, and inclusion is attached to the concept of memory as curriculum (Hendry and Whitfield, 2013; Zinn, 1980/2015; Brown and Au, 2015; Gross, 2002; Woodson, 1933; Jedlicki, 2004; Whitman, 2017; Snyder, 2021; Kaplan, 2005; and Koposov, 2017), and how teaching DEI often requires summoning the often ignored ghosts of the distant and immediate past. This conceptual piece bridges document analysis with curriculum theory in teacher education. I call this act “curriculum necromancy.” In this philosophical curriculum inquiry, I will discuss the idea of memory as curriculum and epistemicide through the regressive-progressive-analytical-synthetical steps of the current method, which combines autoethnography with philosophical curriculum inquiry.

Author

• Nicholas E. Mitchell, University of Kansas
  Presenting Author